“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

For many creators, this was the dream we aspired to when we started thinking seriously (but not too seriously) about what we really wanted to do with our lives.

Maybe you wanted to make movies, record music, play professional sports, write novels, maybe it was a job that didn’t even exist yet.

Our individual dreams were varied, grouped together only by the refrain we grew accustomed to hearing, that we couldn’t do them as a career.

For many of us, we didn’t allow ourselves to express our dream out loud, we only half believed it was possible, and as much as it annoyed us that our parents kept nagging us about having a backup plan in place, we kinda thought maybe we should have a backup plan in place.

But we kept the dreams alive, kept working, and slowly what started as a dream and a hobby started turning into a craft.

Honing Our Craft

We realized that we could hone our inputs to influence our output, that with focused practice we could develop our skills further than we had thought possible, that it wasn’t all about innate talent.

Most importantly, we realized that there were other people doing this work for a living and that maybe, just maybe we could model what they were already doing and maybe we could start doing our craft for a living as well.

When we got our first client, we almost exploded with excitement.

This was proof that this could work. This was validation that we had been right to keep our dream alive when everyone else told us it was impossible.

That client didn’t pay that well, and our work still had a long way to go, but it was a start.

Taking the Leap

That first client led to more clients and pretty soon it was looking like maybe it was time to take the leap and turn our craft into our full-time gig.

After too much deliberation, we built up the required resolve and made the transition to working for ourselves as professional creators.

The thrill was immense, at least at the start.

We were in control of our destinies, in control of our time, for many of us we could work from anywhere we wanted. A whole world of possibilities was suddenly open to us.

If only we had the time and emotional bandwidth to take advantage of these new opportunities…

Being the Boss Isn’t All It Was Cracked up to Be

It didn’t take long for the initial thrill to fade into something more resembling an ever-increasing pressure, as we realized that we were in control of our destinies and that there would be no one to blame but ourselves if all these years of dreaming, working, and strategizing came crashing down around us.

What’s more, this whole “never work a day in your life” thing sure seemed to be filled with a lot of work.

Sure we still loved our craft and were proud of the work we created, but it didn’t feel like we spent a whole lot of time doing it anymore.

Instead, our days seemed to be filled more and more with emails, bookkeeping, and researching our competition with increasing despair that we’ll never create work that good.

Stagnation, and a Crossroads

A couple of years in, we’re still getting by, getting some better clients, raising our rates, doing better work. But we’re beginning to question whether we can sustain this for another 30 years.

Our days are still filled with less creating than we’d like, we’ve leveled up our skills but still don’t measure up to our competition, and the stress of doing good work while managing our business is really starting to wear us down.

Assessing our options we figure that maybe we could hire people to contract work to, building out our team to lessen our own load. As we think more about it, however, it starts to sound like that might lead to us simply becoming a manager, leading to even less time doing our craft, and creating.

We then figure that maybe if we raised our rates enough, and got big enough clients, we could afford to work for one or two clients at a time and not have to deal with the constant scrambling to keep the pipeline full, manage a dozen small clients while also finding time to create work they’re happy with.

But how do we even find those clients? We don’t have the education, the pedigree, the raw talent or the learned skills to feel confident charging enough to make this plan work. And besides, even if we did have that confidence, we don’t have anyone in our network that would even consider paying that kind of money for the work we do.

Dreaming of a Stable Life

Finally, our mind turns to daydreaming about finding a day job and moving on from this endlessly exhausting life of constant attention on keeping all the balls we’re juggling in the air.

The more we think about it the better it sounds.

No pressure, limited responsibility, a steady paycheque, the ability to leave our work at the office when we come home in the evening.

As enticing as this sounds at first, we know that this isn’t the answer. We know that we need to create, that there is work inside us that matters and needs to find its way out.

But things can’t carry on like this, the endless client revisions, emails, phone calls, the emotional rollercoaster of creating work for other people.

Where Next?

As we run circles in our mind for weeks and then months, we realize that our whole life’s dream had been to do this work for ourselves.

It had seemed near-impossible at the time, but we had achieved it, and fairly quickly at that.

So what next?

We had been so excited to realize our dream that we didn’t take the time to set our sights for the next star to shoot for.

Instead, we got caught up in a reactive cycle of just striving to do more of what we were doing, without any intention behind it, no thought of why we were actually doing the work we were doing in the way we were doing it.

As we look inward and reflect on what it is we really want from our lives, we realize that there is another dream buried inside us that we had yet to acknowledge.

Repeat The Process

We realize that our skills and experience have the potential to do more than provide a living for us and create work for our clients. We have the potential to create an impact with our work.

The pieces of a new vision start coming together in our mind and our excitement builds as we begin to feel the pull on our internal compass aligning itself to a new North star.

It doesn’t look easy, in fact it looks almost impossible.

But we achieved the impossible once, who’s to say we can’t do it again?

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